Archive for July, 2018

Mostly I’m thinking about what it can mean to be with someone. To giving attention to each particular process with a person and seeing where it goes. Taking proper time to listen. Bringing a focus to the body perhaps. Being responsive to possibilities, trusting in the idea of possibility that connections can and will come. Something could go further than might appear possible at first. But it’s here in these spaces, in these places of discovery with someone that I like to be. It’s scary too and it’s hard to explain what might happen. Time and again I struggle to describe it. But I keep asking myself the questions around how and why, and who I am through all of this, and it keeps me here.

letter to the cottage (sent 8.3.17)

Thank you fire, chair, bed, blanket, hot water bottle, window

Chord from the light, reminder of a distant home

Preparing to leave

Casting a net over moments caught

Supermarket café, choreography of shoppers through the panoramic aperture between two spaces

Stirling in the moonlight – Timeless

Teddy folded, squashed inside the coils of cable, pushed hard under the chest

We are delighted to be hosting Authentic Movement teacher Susan Schell in Abercych this September.

She is an inspiring and emotionally courageous movement practitioner, also now also working as a interfaith hospice chaplain.

Bigger than the Body

17th to 22nd September 2018

Abercych, Pembrokeshire, Wales

As movers, we will begin with the bare bones that support the form of Authentic Movement; connection to self, sensation, imagination, memory and perception. We will also be deepening our experience of what it is to hold the space, both within us as well as outside our physical bodies as we witness one another. At first glance, we are often most aware of what occupies the space, the people, walls, floor and so on, and less aware of the space that is surrounding and infusing everything.

In our seemingly concrete world, it is unusual to register the fact that what appears as ‘object’ is predominately ‘space’. To recognize that space does not belong to anyone yet fills ALL, can provide us with an experience of space as connective tissue – the unifying element between the visible and invisible, form and essence – that which is holding us. Through time an intimacy grows, a balance between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’, ‘seeing’ and ‘sensing’ that can bring us to the threshold of grace.

£350 (non-residential – low cost accommodation available locally)

For more info & to book contact Stirling: 01239 841488/rstirlingsteward@gmail.com

Places limited to 14

Susan Schell has been teaching and performing from a foundation deeply planted in the practice of improvisational forms for over 40 years. In the early 80’s she studied in-depth the practice of Authentic Movement with Janet Adler. Since then, she has been exploring, developing and teaching on-going classes, intensives and retreats in the US and abroad. In 2012 she completed a two year interfaith chaplaincy program and now, in addition to dancing, she also serves as a hospice chaplain.